SAN FRANCISCO — The Bay Area was a big presence at the Democratic National Convention, and it’s also playing a big role in another part of the campaign, one that people here in California don’t see as much. That’s the advertising campaign.
One example is a pro-Donald Trump campaign ad from the Make America Great Again PAC, featuring a crime victim in San Francisco. The Golden Gate Bridge is also featured. The ad attacks Kamala Harris’ criminal past, specifically as San Francisco’s district attorney, and is getting a lot of traction in swing states like Pennsylvania.
“I got robbed,” the victim says in the ad. “They tried to run me over with the getaway car. They tried to kill me, right here.”
“Amanda’s attacker was an illegal drug dealer who had been arrested twice before,” a narrator said.
That attack happened in Pacific Heights in July 2008. Amanda Kiefer was robbed of her purse and then run over by her attacker, a man in the country illegally who had been arrested twice before, once for drug trafficking and once for purse snatching. It was one of several incidents that have raised questions about San Francisco’s sanctuary city policies. Most notably, the murder of a father and his two sons in a gang-involved killing. That was also in 2008. The Edwin Ramos case effectively led to changes in sanctuary policy that went back to the 1980s.
“We stopped the process of sending people out of state,” Gavin Newsom said of the changes in 2008. “And we started having conversations with the city attorney’s office. With the U.S. attorney’s office.”
Hank Plante, a political reporter for KPIX, asked Harris about the controversy that year.
“Your critics are already saying that your opposition to the death penalty is going to hurt you,” Plante said. “Your support for sanctuary city is going to hurt you. What do you say?”
“I say crime is a nonpartisan issue,” Harris responded. “And what most people want is an attorney general who follows the rule of law.”
16 years later, the issue plays a role in the presidential campaign.
“Undocumented immigration is the issue that Trump wants to make this election about,” said Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State. “If they can tie Vice President Harris to those kinds of things, that’s the kind of ad that can have an impact.”
McDaniel says the details of the case are inevitably overshadowed by the optics. The ad not only hits the immigration and crime buttons, but also has the added benefit of including longtime Republican foe, the city of San Francisco.
“A little out of control, issues of drugs, immigration, homelessness, taxes,” McDaniel said. “These issues that Republicans have been trying to emphasize for a long time are core Democratic issues.”
What’s different this time is that San Francisco’s leadership is so prominent at the top of the Democratic power structure.
“That wouldn’t have been the case 30 years ago,” McDaniel said of the shift. “That a national electorate probably would have seen San Francisco as too extreme, too liberal, and that’s no longer the problem among Democrats, but Republicans still see that as a vulnerability and want to highlight that.”
Donald Trump, when he speaks to the crowd in San Francisco about the Harris dossier, often does so with wild misstatements — for example, claiming that since District Attorney Harris “refused to arrest murderers.” That is false. Ramos himself was charged and convicted of murder,
The attacker in the case mentioned in the ad was also convicted. When that happened, Kamala Harris lobbied for his deportation back to Honduras, which eventually happened in 2011.
